Archive for July, 2009

Important Rules for Link Building

There are two major components to ranking a website for a particular keyword or keyphrase.  First, you need a fair amount of quality content on the website, which incorporates the keyphrase many times throughout the site’s pages.  This is pretty easy to do, since you have complete control over what appears on your website.  The hardest part of ranking any website is acquiring a large amount of relevant, powerful links, but if you follow certain rules and tips, you can do this with effort and planning.

When making links yourself, you can choose what anchor text you want in your links.  The anchor text is the title of the link, and it is very important to choose your anchor texts wisely, as it determines what you will rank for in the search engines.  Your website should be devoted to ranking for one keyword, at least initially, as if you try to split your efforts, the work will be much harder.  For example, if you want to rank for “lose weight fast”, you would build links with the anchor text “lose weight fast.”  However, since you need to make the linking look as natural to Google as possible, you can’t make all your anchor texts say, “Lose weight fast.”  About a fourth of your links should have your keyphrase, and the other seventy-five percent should be variations of that keyphrase or your site title.

When you first launch a new site, you can’t build links too quickly, or that will look suspicious to Google.  There are ways to build links incredibly fast, such as with certain link building tools, but you should hold off on using such tools until your site is between thirty and sixty days old.  Once your site gets past a certain age, it really doesn’t matter how fast you build links, as long as it is not totally excessive.

Link building should be the primary thing you do when promoting a site.  Content is important, but the time it takes to create content is little compared to link building.  For a site, about 80% of the work, including developing the site, is just link building.  That is how important this is to the success of your website, so it is important to do it right and well.

The Key to Good Affiliate Marketing

Out of all the ways to make money from advertising online, affiliate marketing has the most profit potential.  In affiliate marketing, you make money when you refer a customer who buys the affiliate’s product.  For example, if you are an affiliate for cat food, and the commission is 20%, then you would make $4 on a $20 bag of cat food.  You can see how this would add up considerably, especially with high amounts of traffic, bigger purchases, and larger commission rates. This is a great way to make money from home.

The drawback of affiliate marketing is that it requires the most action from the user.  They have to not only click through to the website, but part with their money, which is a significant step for most people.  Programs like Google AdSense pay you just for clicks, but when it comes to affiliate programs, you must refer actual sales. It may not be shortcuts to internet millions, but it’s close.

This is not as difficult as it seems, especially if you execute correct affiliate marketing strategies.  First and foremost, you need a website that has information and articles about the product you are selling.  With proper search engine optimization, people will find your website through the search engines when looking for the product, and many of them will be in the market for said item.  Statistically, if you have enough visitors, a good portion of them will want to buy what you are selling.

When deciding what affiliate product to market, you need to take in to consideration many factors and ask yourself some questions.  What is the product?  Is it quality, respected, and affordable?  As for the terms of the partnership, what is the commission, and are there any special conditions or restrictions?  You want to promote a product that has a chance of selling well and can make you money, or else all your effort will be for nothing.

It can be hard to predict how well you will do with a single affiliate program, so it is advised that you start multiple websites and test out several affiliate programs.  When you find one that works particularly well, you can focus more energy in to it.  It may sound like a lot of work having to manage multiple websites, but it is even more difficult and frustrating to put all your eggs in one basket and fail.  The more websites you have, the more of a chance there is that one or a few will become successful, and you can always scrap ones that do not work out.  Once you have a network of established sites, you will make plenty of easy money online.

The Components of Starting a Website

With the vast amount of resources available on today’s Internet, starting a website is easier than ever before.  Also, since the Internet is frequented by hundreds of millions of people a day, there is a great opportunity to make easy money online.  Each visitor is a potential moneymaker for you, whether it be from them clicking advertisements or buying a product.

There are two things that you need to start a site.  The first is a domain name, which is the URL of your site.  Google.com is a domain name, as is Wikipedia.com.  A domain comprises both the website’s title and the top-level domain (TLD) extension, such as .com, .org, .net, .info, .us, etc.  Unfortunately for budding webmasters, all of the simple domain names were registered more than a decade ago, so domains nowadays must be very unique.  Once someone registers a domain, it is theirs until they transfer it, cancel it, or forget to renew it.  Don’t count on someone ever forgetting to renew a domain name you are eyeing; if there is an already taken domain that you want, consider contacting the owner and offering to purchase it.  Be aware that high quality domains can cost thousands, even tens of thousands, of dollars, so it may be cheaper to spend $10 and get your own original domain.

The second piece of the puzzle is hosting.  With just a domain, you have no server to store content on, and that is where a hosting firm comes in.  For a small fee per month, they lease you servers for space and bandwidth, and they also provide you with website building and analysis tools.  Some hosters feature what is known as cPanel, which is an all-in-one control panel for managing and updating your website, and it is much easier to use than an FTP client.

Building a website is much easier than getting people to come to it.  With billions of web pages online, no one is going to stumble across yours by accident.  In order to coerce visitors in to coming and staying on your site, you need to have a consistent stream of high quality content.  You also need to create links to your website, which serve a dual purpose of advertising and strengthening your website for search engines.  With an established website, you can make tons of easy money online through advertising or affiliate programs.